At its best, Aurora Theatre Company’s production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” isn’t just a farce. It’s a symphony.

You could make a meal of an evening just by reading Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, about two frivolous young couples who can’t quite tie the knot, partly for doubt over whether the young men are in fact named Ernest — coincidentally, a dealbreaker for each of the capricious young ladies — and partly for the usual reasons the patrician enforcers of the class system forbid their young from marrying. Wilde bombards you with aphorisms that could stand on their own, independent of the play’s context: “The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous.” “It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.”

In continuously turning inside out, in constantly subverting your expectations — even long after you’ve scolded yourself to expect the unexpected — the script can leave you unsure whether humankind and its institutions have any dignity or legitimacy left. But it’s a joyful uncertainty, one that liberates rather than debases.

At the Aurora, where the show opened Thursday, April 18, the finest performers in Josh Costello’s cast — Anna Ishida and Patrick Kelly Jones as lovers Gwendolen and Algernon; Sharon Lockwood the imperious Lady Bracknell — add still further pleasure to the avalanche of wit. They make it sing — and croak and hiss and squeal, thunder and bark and gurgle. They distend syllables. They ride the waves of diphthongs. They scale octaves in a breath and then find a comedic thump of a note to land on. It’s pitch as punch line.

This is what training and craft and mastery look like, and it feels like a luxury to see them on clear and lavish display in a world so often skeptical of expertise. Jones communicates not just that his character is lying; you see how he comes up with an idea, then tries out how it sounds, then feels tremendously satisfied with himself, all within a moment. Ishida can pop open a pair of retractable eyeglasses or snap shut a diary as if she’s wielding deadly weapons. The way she asserts her own sweetness — heaving in an extra syllable, so that the word sounds like, “sa-weetness” — you know you’d better believe her, or else.

Michael Torres is impeccably cast in any farce. He’s the sort of actor whose mere presence onstage acts like a shot of giddiness, as if he has a Muppet as an invisible scene partner. Here, he’s a butler and then a rector. Watch as, in the latter role, he realizes he’s unconsciously exhibited his lust for tutor Miss Prism (Trish Mulholland), in the way he’s delivered what could be a dry line: “A classical allusion merely, drawn from the pagan authors.” He’s all but slobbering with desire, then all but naked with awareness and regret.

The show’s energy isn’t always as fizzy as it might be, nor do cast members always play off each other as they might. Costello’s often elegant staging occasionally strains, as when he seats Algernon and Jack (Mohammad Shehata), another of the young lovers, on a bench facing away from each other yet twisting partway back, in a way that no two human beings who are alone in a room talking to each other would ever place themselves.

Yet Maggie Whitaker’s costume design always keeps the show looking smart. Her color palettes — dusky pinks and greens, then burgundy and burnt orange — could be whole worlds unto themselves. But her ensembles aren’t just pleasing; they define characters with rare thoughtfulness and depth. You understand anew just what a bumpkin the lass Cecily (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera) is relative to the urbane Gwendolen, thanks to the former’s full skirts and ruffles compared to the latter’s cropped blazer, wide-leg pants and skullcap with hatpin.

You immediately place Algernon as a dandy the instant you see his plum-colored suit. A shabby floral hat telegraphs Prism’s bohemian aspirations, just as the two dead animals draped around Lady Bracknell’s shoulders as a stole enhance her predatory power.

She’s predatory, yet she’s thoroughly ridiculous, and it’s part of Wilde’s genius that she can be both at once.